Crime Blog

911 recording: Sister of accused killer Eddie Ray Routh feared for her life

Update at 5:09 p.m.: In a 911 recording from a September call to Lancaster police, accused killed Eddie Ray Routh’s mother told the operator that her son suffered from PTSD.

“He’s threatening to kill himself and others,” Jodi Routh said. “He probably needs to go to the VA to the emergency room and they need to admit him to the mental ward.

As officer responded to the scene, a 911 operator called to check back in. Jodi Routh told the operator that he had taken on foot with his dog and wasn’t wearing shoes or a shirt.

She said one of her son’s Marine Corps buddies had taken the weapons that were in the house with them for safekeeping.

“They’re all hunting weapons, you know shotguns and rifles,” Jodi Routh said. “He was threatening to you know shoot himself and I just can’t have that. …We were trying to get them out of here without him seeing us take them out.”

Update at 4:10 p.m: The brother-in-law of accused killer Eddie Ray Routh described a paranoid Routh who arrived to his home and said he’d murdered two people because “he couldn’t trust anyone anymore and everyone was out to get him,” according to a search warrant affidavit.

According to the affidavit, Routh “admitted to killing Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield at Rough Creek Lodge Shooting Range” and “admitted to stealing Kyle’s pickup truck” in a statement to police.

Routh, who is accused of killing Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle and Kyle’s neighbor, Chad Littlefield, called his sister and brother-in-law from an apartment in Alvarado to see if they were home before driving to their house in Midlothian in Kyle’s black pickup truck, the affidavit says.

When Routh arrived around 5:45 p.m., his brother-in-law Gaines Blevins said he was “acting and talking strangely.” Routh told his brother-in-law and sister, Laura, that he and two other people “were out shooting target practice and he couldn’t trust them so he killed them before they could kill him.” Routh told them “he traded his soul for a new truck.”

Laura Blevins told police her brother seemed “out of his mind saying people were sucking his soul and that he could smell the pigs. He said he was going to get their souls before they took his.”

When she asked Routh who he had killed, he said Chris Kyle and Kyle’s friend. “I asked him if he was kidding and he said no repeatedly,” the affidavit says. She urged him to turn himself in.

Lancaster police obtained a warrant to search Routh’s single-story home for shell cases, bullets, blood evidence, video surveillance equipment, firearms and other evidence that might be linked to the double murder, the affidavit says.

Original item posted at 1:34 p.m.: In a frantic 911 recording, the sister of accused killer Eddie Ray Routh told a 911 operator that her brother had just left her home after confessing to murder.

“I’m terrified for my life because I don’t know if he’s going to come down here,” Laura Blevins said, according to a recording released by Midlothian police on Tuesday.

Routh, a 25-year-old Marine expert marksman who served in Iraq and Haiti, is accused of killing Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield at an Erath county shooting range on Saturday afternoon. Authorities say he fled in Kyle’s truck and was later captured in Lancaster. He is now being held in the Erath County jail.

“I don’t know if he’s being honest with me,” Blevins said. “I’m just really terrified. He says that he killed two guys. They went out to a shooting range.”

While Blevins was on the phone with the operator, the family left their home and began driving to the police department.

As the call continued, Blevins described him as being psychotic and said she did not know whether he was on drugs.

“He’s all crazy,” Blevins said.

Blevins’ husband told the 911 operator that Routh had told them he had two guns in the truck. He said he didn’t know where Routh was headed.

“He was talking kind of babble,” Blevins’ husband said.

He said that he did not make any threats toward them. He also said that Routh had recently been diagnosed with PTSD.

“He’s been acting a little weird from that,” he said. “He just got out of a mental hospital last week.”

The call ended when the family arrived at the Midlothian Police Department.

According to police records released Monday, Routh told his sister that he had “traded his soul for a new truck.”